I’m sorry for being gone for so long. To make up for lost time, I’ve written this essay to share some of my reflections from the past year. Please be aware that the writing is kind of emotional and a bit lengthy, but for those that choose to bear with it, thank you. It is not my best work yet.
– Alex
Everyone I know and love has been suffering for the longest time, and so have I. In fact, the thought has been creeping up on me for several years, maybe even the better part of a decade – a steady suspicion that I have been wholeheartedly grieving something my entire life. It feels like a constant tap on my shoulder, like a gentle, persistent reminder that something in the World is missing. I have been trying so hard, forever, to find an answer.
Entering the World: Subject, Feeling, Attachment
There is a controversial theory in psychoanalytic tradition that says we are all born into trauma. That the physical and psychic separation of Child from Mother – the violent, literally breathtaking first encounter with the Outside World – creates our first experience with anxiety. According to Otto Rank, Freud’s protégé turned outcast, this birth trauma shapes all of our subsequent anxieties and circumscribes even the process of becoming human. Life, in Rank’s words, is actually “a mere succession of separations. Beginning with birth, going through several weaning periods and the development of the individual personality, and finally culminating in death.” Living and dying are constantly in balance, and we are always (subconsciously) in search of both prenatal bliss and suicidal nothing, a limbo between oneness and termination.
I was crying like I was just born
産まれたてみたいに泣いてた
Even on the nights you lose sight of the world, the world doesn't end
きみがせかいを見失った夜も せかいは終わらない
As long as you’re alive, it won't end
生きてる限り終わらない– Haru Nemuri, “愛よりたしかなものなんてない / Trust Nothing But Love,” 1:20
… the King asked: “What is the very best and the most preferable thing for Man?” The demon remained silent, stubborn, and motionless; until he was finally compelled by the King, and then broke out into shrill laughter, uttering these words: “Miserable, ephemeral species, children of chance and of hardship, why do you compel me to tell you what is most profitable for you not to hear? The very best is quite unattainable for you: it is, not to be born, not to exist, to be Nothing. But the next best for you is – to die soon.
– Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, from page v of Rank’s Trauma of Birth
The lasting impact of Rank’s thought is still evolving. Many of his original ideas, particularly those applying his theory of separation to the whole development of humankind, have historically been neglected by the mainstream psychological community, and his writing has also been misused by those seeking to make a more biological argument about birth. But there are traces of Rank that persist, notably within existential and brief therapy as well as in the currently popular fields of object relations and attachment theory. The influence of birth trauma theory here lies predominantly in its conception of the primacy of the mother-child relationship – something that we take for granted in our understanding of psychology today but, at the time, set Rank apart from his castration-focused, Freudian colleagues.
To conceive of the mother-child relationship through a post-Rankian lens is also to believe that, to some degree, nurture is nature. Pleasure, pain, death drive… all of our feelings and motivations, these seeming facts of life, arise from that primal connection to the mother figure.
In some ways, attachment theory puts this in less abstract terms. What a year it was for attachment theory in the American psyche – as a recent New York Times feature with the Buzzfeed-esque headline “Are You Anxious, Avoidant or Secure?” highlights, 2021 saw this psychological theory take over mainstream relationship discourse, likely propelled by the pandemic mental health crisis and, ironically, TikTok.
At its core, modern attachment theory focuses on the pivotal role that attachment figures, e.g., parents, play in shaping how a child relates to others, particularly as they grow up and enter intimate adult partnerships. For example, a child who is repeatedly neglected when upset is likely to grow up and struggle with processing and verbalizing their own emotions, exhibiting more avoidant, hyper-independent behaviors. Alternatively, a child who receives care and attention but only inconsistently might develop more anxious or disorganized tendencies, experiencing more codependence and immediate fear of abandonment.
For many people, myself included, the initial encounter with attachment theory is revelatory. For anyone who has been in less than healthy or secure dynamics, familial, romantic or otherwise, the explanatory power of attachment and how it manifests in communication and relationship patterns illuminates past experiences and provides some degree of closure. And what is especially enticing about attachment theory is that, unlike similarly popular schools of thought like the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator or astrology, there is actually a significant amount of academic research supporting its development and application to modern psychology. Everyone can verifiably fall under some variation of Anxious, Avoidant, or Secure.
This is not the only theory of “attachment” – Buddhism, of course, speaks of attachment and non-attachment, a happy semantic overlap that, for me at least, played a significant role in the initial stages of therapeutic practice. Indeed, to approach relation to others from a place of non-attachment, of appreciation, of mindfulness for the always ephemeral nature of feelings, of presence, of being, in many ways encompasses the path to secure attachment in the contemporary, clinical sense. In short, Buddhist practice can certainly help one heal from childhood trauma in ways similar to a nurturing therapist or a healthy, communicative relationship.
But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. Even as I try to write didactically, keeping the finer details of my past obscured, I feel its presence. Every line and every paragraph carries a genealogy tracing back through multitudes of singular experience with loss and with heartbreak. To philosophize or poeticize is still an attempt to make meaning out of personal chaos, and to share like this is still an act of care for the self.
I am referring to what might be called the "arts of existence." What I mean by the phrase are those intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre…
– Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, page 10
We need a larger perspective that can recognize and include two different tracks of human development – which we might call growing up and waking up, healing and awakening, or becoming a genuine human person and going beyond the person altogether. We are not just humans learning to become buddhas, but also buddhas waking up in human form, learning to become fully human.
– John Welwood, “Human Nature, Buddha Nature,” interview with Tricycle
Of course I still experience forms of limerence. Of course I still feel the fear of abandonment. Of course I still sense a drive toward death. Entering the World means being thrust into the void between knowing and becoming. The subject (Child), in recognizing her separation from the object (Mother), sees the two outcomes of consummate union or complete annihilation. The dualism plagues us all. That’s psychoanalysis baby.
And that’s where Buddhist practice always factors in. I should probably speak of sunyata and anatta – emptiness and no-self. A “proper” Buddhist would speak of the illusory nature of all phenomena and of our potential to see beyond the self-concept. They would tell you that true freedom lies on the middle path of non-dualism and that diligent practice can help you transcend the swinging pendulum of painful existence. Proceeding from therapy, meditating and contemplating and listening have been, in so many ways, means for me to process my feelings almost entirely alone. To sit with the proverbial inner child and hold his hand. To be a father and teacher to myself. And yet the trauma of separation still haunts me – my means have not yet made me anything close to a bodhisattva, just as all the theory and practice in the world cannot erase the World itself. Something is always missing.
As, according to the Freudian concept, hysteria is closely related to artistic production, the obsessional neurosis to the formation of religion and philosophic speculation, so the psychoses are closely related to the mythological world view… we need not avoid the next step, that of analysis of cosmology itself, for then we shall find that it is nothing other than the infantile recollection of one’s own birth projected on to Nature… (73)
In this light we can explain the myths of world-creation and of “worldparents,” which, in the process of cosmic assimilation, have preserved for us the most sublime attempts to “undo” the birth trauma, to deny the separation from the mother. (104-5)
– Otto Rank, Trauma of Birth
If anything, the past year has revealed to me that I cannot be a “proper” Buddhist, at least in the tradition adopted by so many Western Buddhists. “Growing up and waking up”… “healing and awakening”… even understanding that these are processes and not events, all ultimately feel just out of reach to me in the World as is. And even if knowledge can grant closure, what is closure without change? When one adopts the world-as-mother yet encounters her endless abuse, how can we tell them that the only way out is within?
Surely the object must recognize the subject too. What happens when the World sees back?
Being-in-the-World: Surrendering the Self
Monday, December 6, 2021, 10 PM. I head outside after work to get some food, walking briskly in the cold wind. I am startled by a woman running up from behind. She is visibly agitated, almost yelling.
Words cascade from her mouth, breaking down into syllables as they smack the pavement, melting, merging. She is upset that I had ignored her calls for blocks. How dare I treat someone like that? After a brief moment of confusion, I realize that she couldn’t have known that I had headphones in, covered by my hood in the dark. I apologize for the misunderstanding and for my transgression. The ask from her, like from so many others on the street, is just some money.
We go to a bodega a few blocks away where I withdraw some bills from the ATM and she picks out some yogurt, cookies, and chips. As soon as I hand her the cash, she offers to buy me something too – with the money I have just given her. Not taking no for an answer, she gets me some Oreos and a lemonade.
Throughout our encounter, she details to me decades upon decades of trauma and abuse, none of which I ask to hear, but all of which I can’t help but listen to. Eventually, it simply feels like she is reciting a script, trying to convince me – and the World – of her humanity. All I can do in the moment, beyond the money, is say sorry.
As I sit in my room later that night, I can’t stop crying.
I remember the young Chinese man around my age who asked for a job and, when I explained that I didn’t have any jobs to give, just wanted to walk with me. We sat together in Barnes & Noble for a bit before he headed out. He looked like someone from my family back home.
I remember the folks who stayed at the shelters in Harvard Square and asked for alms during the day, even during the frigid Cambridge winter. One man sitting outside the book store told me about his tumultuous relationship with his ex-lover, whom he was planning to visit one day in the Bay Area. When I was in town this past winter, I bumped into him again at the exact same spot, two years later. He is still waiting for the day.
Going to public school in downtown Portland, it was common to encounter people without a place to stay, sometimes even roaming the hallways of the school building. One person walked up to me when I asked if he needed help, held his finger inches from my face and told me, calmly, that he could kill me, you know. We stood facing each other, frozen in place, until he was dragged away by campus police, who later scolded me for engaging in the first place.
… but the Buddha advised us to do the opposite. We have to try to go home and recognize the suffering in it and embrace it and look deeply into it. In that way, we come to understand the nature, the roots of our suffering, and we see the way out, the way of transformation and healing…
… guanyin (观音) means to listen, to look… to listen to the suffering of the world…
– Thich Nhat Hanh, “If You Know How to Suffer, You Suffer Less,” Dharma talk at Plum Village
There are countless “logics” of power that would be fitting to critique. There is always, of course, the intricate connection between housing, poverty, mental illness, disability, criminalization, policing, redlining, landlords, gentrification, urban development, prison-industrial complex, school-to-prison pipeline, etc. and capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy, patriarchy… but at a certain point, the sociological analysis, although essential, almost becomes stale. Just go on Left Twitter for a week or, more seriously, go read a book that will critique any of this better than I ever can.
No matter how much social theory I study, I am always drawn back to philosophies of affect or experience or everyday life. I am a simp for the mind and the spirit. Not because I think that structures of domination and oppression aren’t real or immediate in the World, obviously, but because my relationships to these structures often feel far less material or physically causal than they are deeply emotional or phenomenological. I am afforded at least that privilege.
The event of riot police beating protestors outside the precinct is not so much to me a temporal instance of brutality, but rather a turning of the wheel mediated via sights and sounds of immense rupture and violence. I hardly care for the tear gas in my lungs, but I cannot escape the blind fear and rage captured by choked screams echoing in the street. The impact of a rubber bullet fades into a scar, but the disgust for the World that produced the (racial) ontology that produced the power that produced the history that produced the bastard cop lingers on, scabbing over, tearing off, scabbing over, tearing off.
I feel before anything else, and I can’t stop crying.
This discussion of the word ‘world’, and our frequent use of it have made it apparent that it is used in several ways. By unravelling these we can get an indication of the different kinds of phenomena that are signified, and of the way in which they are interconnected.
1. “World” is used as an ontical concept, and signifies the totality of those entities which can be present-at-hand within the world.
2. “World” functions as an ontological term, and signifies the Being of those entities which we have just mentioned. And indeed 'world' can become a term for any realm which encompasses a multiplicity of entities: for instance, when one talks of the ‘world’ of a mathematician, ‘world’ signifies the realm of possible objects of mathematics.
3. “World” can be understood in another ontical sense – not, however, as those entities which Dasein essentially is not and which can be encountered within-the-world, but rather as that ‘wherein’ a factical Dasein as such can be said to ‘live’. “World” has here a pre-ontological existentiell signification. Here again there are different possibilities: '“world” may stand for the ‘public’ we-world, or one’s ‘own’ closest (domestic) environment.
4. Finally, “world” designates the ontologico-existential concept of worldhood. Worldhood itself may have as its modes whatever structural wholes any special ‘worlds’ may have at the time; but it embraces in itself the a priori character of worldhood in general…
… even the phenomenon of ‘Nature’, as it is conceived, for instance, in romanticism, can be grasped ontologically only in terms of the concept of the world…
– Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, page 93-4
There is, historically and philosophically, a great deal of overlap between Western phenomenology and Buddhism. Without diving into the more explicit engagements (and appropriations) between variants of the two traditions, one of the fundamental areas of synergy lies in their similar relational views of existence. For both Heidegger and Buddha, you and I do not exist as independent objects in the universe – we are not real or substantive in ourselves. Rather, we are present in the universe only insofar as we belong within a vast network of interconnected beings, Others, and things. Heidegger calls this Being-with (Mitsein) or Being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein, also Dasein). Buddhism calls this dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda) and interdependence.
The late Thich Nhat Hanh, my beloved Thay, referred to it as “interbeing.” One of the most influential Buddhist figures of the past century, a primary inspiration for the engaged Buddhist movement, and the person who I consider my first Dharma teacher, Thay passed away as I was in the middle of writing this essay. It was an incredible happenstance – in the process of reflecting on grief, I began to grieve again.
For most, the realization of interdependence comes only after experiencing great loss. It is in the vast, consuming absence of something we once assumed to be permanent that we recognize how spiritually interlocked with the rest of the universe we are, every shift in Indra’s net reflecting across our manifold faces, our contorted bodies, our entire essences of being. Through existential suffering, we come to understand the grand chain of causation, the nidanas – cutting through mental fabrications, cutting through earthly desires, cutting through the cycle of life and death itself. In that sense, death is an awakening, a lesson that reveals to us the reality of the World. And so Thay teaches on.
In this context, the early childhood loss of my own father, a man who I have zero recollection of yet, according to others, increasingly resemble, poses a world-collapsing ontological quandary. If the person who I am becoming has never existed in my World to begin with, then who am I but Nothing? Here, birth trauma enters the metaphysical realm – having already been separated from Mother, I look in the mirror only to find that I do not recognize the person staring back. Manjusri’s sword strikes down swiftly. I am without Self, a being truly within the World.
Confronted by this emptiness, I can’t stop crying.
Perhaps it is unsurprising then that I have been grieving my whole life, just as it may be the case that we have all been grieving our whole lives. Entering the World and being in the World, the practice of living is a process of coming to understand that nothing is permanent and that suffering is universal. In understanding the nature of this experience, we are supposed to find liberation.
Yet, another truth reveals itself to us too – there exists a World that we live in. How dare that World punish us.
Can you read my mind? Can you sense what I am about to say?
Without a world, there is no Nature. Without a world, there is no life. What exists outside the charmed circles of Nature and life is a charnel ground, a place of life and death, of death-in-life and life-in-death, an undead place of zombies, viroids, junk DNA, ghosts, silicates, cyanide, radiation, demonic forces, and pollution… Since there are no charnel grounds to speak of in the West, the best analogy, used by some Tibetan Buddhists (from whom the image derives), is the emergency room of a busy hospital. People are dying everywhere. There is blood and noise, equipment rushing around, screams. When the charm of world is dispelled, we find ourselves in the emergency room of ecological coexistence…
Our actions build up a karmic pattern that looks from a reified distance like a realm such as hell or heaven. But beyond the violence that we do, it’s the distance that reifies the pattern into a world picture that needs to be shattered… I’m not saying we need to uproot the trees – I’m saying that we need to smash the aestheticization…
– Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, excerpt from “The End of the World”
I think the time has come to close the gap between ourselves and the World. What is left when the walls come down?
Ending the World: Praxis of Love
In Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece, a prolific series about the adventures of Monkey D. Luffy and his Straw Hat pirate crew, there is an incredible story arc in which Nico Robin, the ship’s archeologist, is captured by the World Government and sentenced to death.
Robin is the sole survivor from the island of Ohara, once home to a thriving community of archeologists seeking out the “True History” of a century-long gap in recorded knowledge that the World Government prohibits anyone from researching. While living most of her childhood with an abusive aunt, Robin had found herself accepted only by the scholars on the island, unlocking her precocious intellectual talent and adopting their life’s purpose as her own.
Prior to being captured, Robin had been on the run for twenty years. When the World Government, a global regime spanning over 170 nations, inevitably discovered Ohara’s illegal research activities, they sent a fleet of battleships to destroy the entire island, massacring everyone Robin knew. At the time, she was only eight years old. And even though Robin was able to escape, a massive bounty was placed on her head, and she spent the entirety of her youth at constant risk of betrayal, forced to exist in alienation as the “Demon of Ohara.” Her will to live, the will of Ohara itself, was kept afloat only by her dream of one day uncovering the True History.
It can probably be said then that the entire premise of Nico Robin as a character builds upon a most profoundly traumatic separation – not only from Mother, but from family, community, and World as a whole. The harsh contradiction of Robin’s existence is that she is simply not supposed to exist – a complete ontological nothingness – and in fact, she herself believes this at the point she is finally caught by the World Government. Not even her dream is worth anything at the end. She is ready for death.
But ultimately, it is not solely her choice whether or not she gets to die.
When she joined the Straw Hat Pirates, Robin found herself part of the first group of friends (nakama) in her life. Like her, each crew member carries their own dream. Roronoa Zoro, the ship’s first mate, dreams of becoming the strongest swordsman. Nami, the ship’s navigator, dreams of making a map of the entire globe. Usopp, the ship’s sniper, dreams of overcoming his cowardice to become a brave warrior of the sea. Sanji, the ship’s cook, dreams of finding the mythical All Blue, which is said to be the meeting point of all wildlife in the ocean. Tony Tony Chopper, an adorable reindeer and the ship’s doctor, dreams of learning how to cure every disease. And of course, Luffy, the ship’s captain, dreams of finding a legendary treasure called the One Piece in order to become the Pirate King, which he believes will grant him the most freedom in the world.
Despite their disparate dreams, the Straw Hats are united by an unwavering, almost irrational loyalty to each other. And it is because of this dedication to one another that, even after Robin is captured by the most formidable power on Earth, they refuse to give up on their friend. Chasing her down to the Tower of Justice where Robin is to be removed from the world forever, the Straw Hats confront the World Government, demanding her release.
To their frustration, Robin reiterates that she does not want to be saved, revealing her fear of being abandoned by the Straw Hats just like everyone else she has loved in her life…
In response, her friends declare war on the entire world.
Having witnessed the most sublime gesture of loyalty humanly possible – the commitment of one’s entire being to saving another – Robin finally trusts the Straw Hats, uttering her deepest, most underlying desire for the first time: to live.
I WANT TO LIVE! TAKE ME OUT TO SEA WITH YOU!
生きたい! 私も一緒に海へ連れてって!
– Nico Robin, One Piece
What prevents the Straw Hats from falling into the trope of martyrdom is, like in all Japanese shonen literature, a combination of superhuman power and unbreakable plot armor. But imagining what it would take to defeat the World Government is not all that different from posing to oneself – and to each other – the existential and ethical dilemmas required to find freedom from suffering today. Both tasks necessitate a truly radical reinterpretation of what it means to be in the World – a war waged against the spiritual and material conditions of existence altogether.
What is your dream? Who do you love? In reflecting on a lifetime of grief, such basic yet fundamental questions emerge as signposts hinting toward an answer.
When it comes to a dream, I speak of neither myth nor reality. What I mean by that is a nod to Adorno and Horkheimer, who famously wrote in the Dialectic of Enlightenment that “myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology” (xviii). With these two theses, Adorno and Horkheimer were expressing a radically controversial claim: that all of our modes of understanding reality, whether through religion or secularized rationality, risk reverting to an uncritical logic, a desperate drive to dominate nature, a blind attempt to reinforce the alienation between subject and object. Even in “enlightenment,” we may become instruments within essentially rigid conceptions of the World. No – when I speak of a dream, I do not envision a more amenable samsara, still cycling between one-dimensional anxieties. Rather, I am speaking of complete freedom.
And what is freedom if not an ineffable horizon? Lying beneath the sky of myth and resting above the sea of history, there is a limit yearning for rupture. This dream is not a teleology or an inevitability, but a gaping hole which we are forever trying to fill. Staring off into the distance, confronting this void, sobbing on our knees in the sand, we are left simply with a brief moment of pause. A split second to reflect. Within that instant, the seed of liberation germinates and sees its chance to emerge, threatening to destabilize the entirety of the World.
There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched.
The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.
– Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” thesis IX
As a sweet-smelling and beautiful lotus flower may grow upon a heap of rubbish thrown on the highway, so also, out of the rubbish heap of beings may appear a disciple of the Buddha…
– The Dhammapada, “Pupphavagga (Flowers),” verses 58-9
There is the dream! Right where the sun sets! Even Marx, so often championed by historical materialists as the ultimate symbol of an almost deterministic scientific socialism, destroyer of the philosophical-theological World, walked on the beach and dreamt of a world he could not yet envision. And even when he dreamed of a world free of religion, it was always rooted in his immanent critique of the World itself.
Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion…
It is, therefore, the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked. Thus, the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics…
As philosophy finds its material weapon in the proletariat, so the proletariat finds its spiritual weapon in philosophy.
– Karl Marx, introduction to Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right
… the air is wonderfully pure and reinvigorating, and you have here at the same time sea air and mountain air. I have become myself a sort of walking stick, running up and down the whole day, and keeping my mind in that state of nothingness which Buddhism considers the climax of human bliss…
– Karl Marx, letter to Antoinette Philips
A “world whose spiritual aroma is religion” is a World begging for liberation from its own constant creation and destruction. This is the horizon spanning all spiritual and political fantasies. And this dream, in Adornian terms, is not even really a concept at all, but a gesture. A sublime gesture toward complete freedom that, without real change, is nothing but blind motioning – non-practices that have “no affect on their objects of action, but are repeated over and over again as a senseless ritual” (“Question of Being,” Negative Dialectics, page 121). This is none other than the infamous paradox of ideology, perhaps the foremost target of critique amongst critical scholars of late capitalism.
It is here that I have been stuck my entire existence, amidst the maelstrom of feelings, beliefs, and values. Asking what the meaning of life is at 6, yelling about a bastardized karma at 11, holding on desperately to scraps of paper with quotes that I think can provide me an answer. Because I feel so adrift, I cling harder to the raft as it disintegrates around me, its process of negation providing only a fleeting moment of bliss, a brief encounter with eudaemonia. Not unlike the woman shouting at me on the street, I cannot help but beg for a way out, studying and trying, reflecting and learning, fucking things up over and over and being fucked over and over again in the process.
And what is this called? This is none other than the eternal problematic of praxis.
No, the truth will not set you free. We can go as far as arguing that this is the ultimate lesson of Buddhism, psychoanalysis, and Marxism (and that this is another reason why they can be productively thought together) – in all three discourses, only praxis will set you free… (119)
In its most basic form, the internal contradiction of praxis works as follows:
(1) in Buddhism, it is the contradiction between the belief in enlightenment that always exists as possibility and the complacent behavior and destructive ideologies enabled by this belief;
(2) in Marxism, it is the contradiction between the belief in the possibility of radically different systems coming into being (as capitalism itself came into being following feudalism) and the structural limits of imagining these different systems within the confinements of capitalist relations; and
(3) in psychoanalysis, it is the contradiction between the belief in the unconscious that includes its own radical freedom and the subjective destruction and entrapment caused by this inexorable quality… (163-4)
… to give up on enlightenment while remaining a Buddhist, or to give up on cure as a psychoanalytic patient or on revolution as a Marxist, might seem to escape the central paradoxes of each problematic, and might indeed make us more moderate, and thus more socially acceptable to others. But this is not the answer either. And even if we go to the hyper-logical extreme and recognize that the very giving up on enlightenment, revolution, and cure might actually generate them as lucky side effects – this is still not the answer. There is no answer. There is praxis. (173)
– Eric Cazdyn, “Enlightenment, Revolution, Cure: The Problem of Praxis and the Radical Nothingness of the Future” in Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (please email me if you’d like a digital copy)
Within the realms of both individual and collective praxis, there is typically supposed to be a moment of realization. In Theravada Buddhism specifically, there is the tripartite system of pariyatti ("theory"), patipatti ("praxis"), and pativedha ("penetration"). And as the translation of pativedha suggests, this moment is not only about coming closer to the (Dhammic) truth, but also about how such an insight is experienced and achieved. It is deep and penetrating. It is often painful and unexpected. It is World-collapsing. That is, to achieve complete freedom, one must not only study the World (theory) and change the World (practice), but also experience the end of the World (realization).
Yes, freedom begins with the revelation that comes only from a gesture toward the end of the World…
I hesitate to say that, because the language inevitably feels a little fascistic. Ending the World? Excuse me? But it is simply, at the most basic level, smashing an aestheticization and creating an entirely new paradigm. The end of the World is not a state, but a process. Just as great personal loss can prompt realization of the true nature of our interdependent universe, so too can the end of the World trigger the eternal emergence of new realities.
So when I speak of a dream, I am speaking of freedom, and when I speak of freedom, I am speaking of the end of the World. And the end of the World begins with a single tear, finally becoming realized when I can’t stop crying. Oh, how immanent the World feels at its end.
What matters in the present world, is not creating the possibility of a mystical experience, or of opening new religious possibilities, there are perhaps none, but it’s about igniting religious action in the profane world.
The profane world, must in its turn be destroyed as such, which is to say that everything in the capitalist world which is given as a thing which transcends and dominates man, must be reduced to the state of an immanent thing, by being subordinated to consumption by man.
– Georges Bataille, Œuvres complètes (Volume 7), from page 53 of Marcus Boon’s “To Live in a Glass House is a Revolutionary Virtue Par Excellence: Marxism, Buddhism, and the Politics of Nonalignment” in Nothing
There is also another way to think about praxis – as the manifestation of will. I think often of will. What drives my will to live on? What drives my will to dream? Of course, the answer might already be obvious, regardless of how difficult it may be to feel or find it in the World today.
It is love.
Against suffering, against grief, against the constant churning of existence, I sob and rage and fight out of nothing – absolutely nothing – but love. Like bell hooks wrote in the opening lines of All About Love: New Visions, “it was clear to me that life was not worth living if we did not know love” (ix). This is the heart of the Buddha’s teaching, as Thay would say, and it is also the core of all great radical traditions. Love that destroys. Love that creates. Love that carries the potential to change everything.
When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality.
– Martin Luther King Jr., “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” speech at Riverside Church
It is in the absence of the World that I first encountered true love, and it has been impossible for my dream to die since. How many times have I contemplated death only to awaken with new love for the World? How many times have I grieved and how many times more before I find the love I am searching for? Indeed, love is the root of my entire praxis of living. Without it, I am metaphysically dead already.
And so, there is something preventing me from complete despair, something directing me toward complete freedom almost independently of the trauma supposedly shaping my very birth and existence. There is love at the end of the World. In coming to terms with this, I am able to realize that I have believed in love since the very beginning. I believe in love more than I believe in life itself. I believe in love so radical that I cannot yet conceive of it. I believe in love so powerful that it is not simply love that lies at the end of the world – it is love that necessitates the end of the World altogether.
Naturally, this type of love propagates itself infinitely in order to fill the void that inspires it. Its praxis changes not only the subject, but the object as well. It dispels the entire illusion of separation, bringing forth a revolutionary strain of spiritual and political compassion.
The Buddha, Shakyamuni, our teacher, predicted that the next Buddha would be Maitreya, the Buddha of love. We desperately need love. And in the Buddha’s teaching we learn that love is born from understanding. The willingness to love is not enough. If you do not understand, you cannot love. The capacity to understand the other person will bring about acceptance and loving kindness.
It is possible the next Buddha will not take the form of an individual. The next Buddha may take the form of a community, a community practicing understanding and lovingkindness, a community practicing mindful living. And the practice can be carried out as a group, as a city, as a nation.
– Thich Nhat Hanh, “The Next Buddha May Be a Sangha,” remarks at Spirit Rock Center
I choose to believe that the next Buddha is already among us. They look just like you and me and nothing like us at all. They are dying in the streets and rotting away behind bars. They have left us behind in times of need and been abandoned by us when they needed us most. They are perpetrators of great violence and victims of terrible abuse at the same time. They are everywhere and nowhere at once. All they know is praxis, and everything they touch is the World. They cannot speak, but they are screaming.
They are calling, calling out to us.
Breathe.
Will you answer them?
Everything is my world
エブリシングイズ マイワールド
And everything is your world
アンドエブリシング イズ ユア ワールド
Everything is my world
エブリシングイズ マイワールド
And everything is your world
アンドエブリシング イズ ユア ワールドTrust nothing but love
愛よりたしかなものなんてない
Trust nothing but love
愛よりたしかなものなんてない
Trust nothing but love
愛よりたしかなものなんてない
Trust nothing but love
愛よりたしかなものなんてない
Trust nothing but love
愛よりたしかなものなんてない
Trust nothing but love
愛よりたしかなものなんてない
What is more certain than love
愛よりたしかなものなんて– Haru Nemuri, “愛よりたしかなものなんてない / Trust Nothing But Love,” 3:11